The relationship between language, thought and culture is of concern to anyone with an interest in what it means to be human.The Language Puzzle explains how the invention of words at 1.6 million years ago began the evolution of human language from the ape-like calls of our earliest ancestors to our capabilities of today, with over 6000 languages in the world and each of us knowing over 50,000 words.Drawing on the latest discoveries in arch...

'A tour de force' Alice Roberts'Wonderful ... A remarkably comprehensive biography of the single most important thing we all share - language' Robin DunbarThe relationship between language, thought and culture is of concern to anyone with an interest in what it means to be human.The Language Puzzle explains how the invention of words at 1.6 million years ago began the evolution of human language from the ape-like calls of o...

A comprehensive study of the evolution of human culture on the Hebridean island of Islay.As an archaeologist, Steven Mithen has worked on the Hebridean island of Islay over a period of many years. In this book he introduces the sites and monuments and tells the story of the island's people from the earliest stone age hunter-gatherers to those who lived in townships and in the grandeur of Islay House. He visits the tombs of Neolithic farmers, forts of Iron Age chiefs...

This is an exhilarating intellectual performance, in the tradition of Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind and Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. On the way to showing how the world of our ancient ancestors shaped our modern modular mind, Steven Mithen shares one provocative insight after another as he answers a series of fascinating questions: were our brains hard-wired in the Pleistocene era by the needs of hunter-gatherers? When did religious beliefs first emerge? Why were the fir...

Steven Mithen's unique history of water and society in the ancient world has never been told before and is particularly relevant today in the face of global climate change.The planet faces a 21st-century global water crisis - but to what extent is this really new? Past societies and ancient civilisations have always faced climate change and been dependent on their ability to harness and manage a water supply. This has often been a key driver of historical change, l...

We live in a world surrounded by remarkable cultural achievements of human kind. Almost every day we hear of new innovations in technology, in medicine and in the arts which remind us that humans are capable of remarkable creativity. But what is human creativity? The modern world provides a tiny fraction of cultural diversity and the evidence for human creativity, far more can be seen by looking back into prehistory. The book examines how our understanding of human creativity can be extend...

A unique interdisciplinary study of the relationships between climate, hydrology and human society from 20,000 years ago to the present day within the Jordan Valley. It describes how state-of-the-art models can simulate the past, present and future climates of the Near East, reviews and provides new evidence for environmental change from geological deposits, builds hydrological models for the River Jordan and associated wadis and explains how present day urban and rural communities manage ...

This timely and innovative book critically explores how cultural heritage in the Global South can be used to mobilise community engagement and promote sustainable tourism at archaeological sites.Whilst the volume covers theoretical issues, it primarily offers insight into how both small and large projects within low- and middle-income countries start, plan and develop. It describes what factors lead some projects to succeed, some to fail and most to have elements of both. Core to t...

A fantastic voyage through 15,000 years of history that laid the foundations for civilisation as we know it by award-winning science writer Steven Mithen.Twenty thousand years ago Earth was in the midst of an ice age. Then global warming arrived, leading to massive floods, the spread of forests and the retreat of the deserts. By 5,000 BC a radically different human world had appeared. In place of hunters and gatherers there were farmers; in place of transient camps...

In this book, Bleda Düring offers an archaeological analysis of Asia Minor, the area equated with much of modern-day Turkey, from 20,000 to 2,000 BC. During this period human societies moved from small-scale hunter-gatherer groups to complex and hierarchical communities with economies based on agriculture and industry. Dr Düring traces the spread of the Neolithic way of life, which ultimately reached across Eurasia, and the emergence of key human developments, including the domestication o...

Fresh, exciting and vividly readable, this is popular history at its very best.Our understanding of world history is changing, as new discoveries are made on all the continents and old prejudices are being challenged. In this truly global journey, political journalist Andrew Marr revisits some of the traditional epic stories, from classical Greece and Rome to the rise of Napoleon, but surrounds them with less familiar material, from Peru to the Ukraine, China to th...

Put aside everything you thought you knew about Neanderthals. Evolutionary detective Danny Vendramini's meticulous research shows they were not docile omnivores, but savage, cannibalistic carnivores: the 'apex predators' of the stone age. And everything else—including humans—was their prey.Vendramini's Neanderthal predation theory argues that the evolution of modern humans—including our unique physiology, sexuality and human nature–is the result of systematic long-term sexual predat...